Wikipedia:Today's featured article/May 31, 2022
Levantine Arabic is a mutually intelligible group of vernacular Arabic varieties spoken in the Levant, in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Turkey. With more than 44 million speakers, Levantine is, alongside Egyptian, one of the two prestige varieties of spoken Arabic most widely understood in the Arab world. It is the closest vernacular Arabic variety to the official Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), with half of all words being common. Nevertheless, Levantine and MSA are not mutually intelligible. Levantine speakers often call their language al-ʿāmmiyya ('slang' or 'colloquial Arabic') and until recently it was rarely written. However, with the emergence of social media, the amount of written Levantine has significantly increased online where Levantine is written using Arabic, Latin, or Hebrew characters. Levantine pronunciation varies greatly along social, ethnic, and geographical lines. Its grammar and lexicon are overwhelmingly Arabic, with a significant Aramaic influence. (Full article...)